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« on: December 14, 2022, 06:54:12 am » |
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AFTER Easter, when Cissy had a morning-room and a boudoir, and the drawing-rooms were practically finished, Sainty entered into undisputed possession of his two back rooms, and spent more and more of his time in them. Only faint echoes of the turmoil in which Lady Belchamber had her being penetrated to that peaceful seclusion. Evening after evening Cissy would dine out with a few of her special cronies and their attendant swains, and go to the theatre or the opera till it was time to begin the round of balls or parties, from which she returned in grey summer dawns, far too tired for there to be any question of her coming down to breakfast next morning. Sometimes Sainty did not set eyes on her for days together. Gradually he slipped back into his old studious life, snatching sketchy little meals from trays, when he remembered to eat anything, and as little a part of the life of the house as if he were in lodgings round the corner.
In May, Lady Charmington came to town, to attend the meetings of the "Ladies' No Popery League," of which she was a leading member.
"My mother writes me she is coming to London," Sainty said. "Of course she will come to us."
"Well, she can if you wish it," Cissy answered; "but I warn you you're preparing trouble for yourself. She won't like the way we live, and when she doesn't like a thing, she is not always silent and accommodating. She'll expect a family breakfast at 9.15, with prayers at 9. I don't suppose she ever breakfasted in her room in her life. I don't know where you breakfast, but I certainly shan't come down."
"I suppose you couldn't, just for the time she's here?" Sainty suggested.
"I'm not such a humbug as to alter my way of life to please her. She may as well find out first as last that I am not cut on her pattern."
"I think she has pretty well made that discovery already," Sainty retorted.
"Well," said Cissy, "she can come if she likes, and if you want her, but she must take us as she finds us. I told you she wouldn't like it. She'd be a great deal happier at Roehampton with Lady Firth. She could come in to her meetings, and if she wanted to lunch here any particular day, I could always tell people to keep out of the way."
"You can't say I interfere with you much, or often ask you to do anything to please me," said Sainty earnestly; "but when we have a great house here, and my own mother wants to come up, I do think it would look strange for us not to take her in."
"Well, please yourself. After all, I was only thinking of you. I can generally hold my own, but if your mother gets her back up, as she inevitably will, you'll have the devil of a time of it."
Sainty had presently occasion to prove the accuracy of his wife's forecast. Acting on Cissy's hint, he dutifully appeared each morning to give Lady Charmington her breakfast. The first day, she lingered before sitting down, as though she were waiting for something.
"Won't you make the tea for me, mother?" Sainty asked. "It's like old times, you and I having breakfast together."
"You don't have prayers, I see," Lady Charmington remarked, as she took her seat. "Or were they earlier? I can quite well come down sooner, if you wish it."
"Well you see, Cissy never comes down to breakfast, and, as you know, I am not a great eater, so when we are alone, I generally have a cup of tea and an egg in the study."
"Why doesn't your wife come to breakfast? is she ill?"
"Oh no, she's well enough. But she's out late at parties and things every night, and I'm glad she does rest a little in the mornings; it's the only time she does."
"I confess I'm a little disappointed in Cissy," Lady Charmington remarked, after contemplating the toast-rack judicially for a time in silence. "I never thought her a very deep or earnest nature, but I did not expect to find her so entirely given up to worldly pursuits."
"Cissy's young and pretty, and people make a great deal of her. After all, it's natural at her age that she should like to enjoy herself."
Lady Charmington sniffed. "Enjoyment! People nowadays seem to think of nothing but enjoyment. We were not put into the world to enjoy ourselves."
"Well, most of us fulfil the object of our being pretty thoroughly then," Sainty said, "and yet every one seems to want to be happy; and it is a good deal to expect of the few who have it in their power that they should voluntarily forego what most people fail to obtain."
"I don't like to hear you talk like that, my boy; you don't seem to have a proper sense of your blessings. You have very much to be thankful for."
Lady Charmington saw nothing incongruous in finding fault with some acrimony if things were not to her liking, but she was always swift to rebuke a complaining spirit in others.
"Her poor mother, who, if a little too fond of society, has a very sincerely religious side to her, must be sadly distressed at her daughter's light-mindedness."
The thought of Lady Eccleston as a pious matron wounded by her child's care for earthly matters was too much for Sainty. "Why, Lady Eccleston goes wherever a candle's lighted," he said; "or if she doesn't, it's because she's failed to get an invitation."
"Censorious, censorious!" replied his mother. "Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? You should watch against that spirit; it'll grow on you."
Sainty was only too glad to have diverted the precious balms to his own head, which had been accustomed to that form of unction for too many years to be easily broken. He saw his mother off to the first of her meetings before there was the smallest chance of her encountering her daughter-in-law, and then betook himself to his own rooms to read the papers. As he drew near to the fire that his languid blood demanded in this uncertain season, his eye fell on the letters he had not as yet thought of opening. As a rule his correspondence was not exciting. It consisted mainly of advertisements and begging letters. The first that he took up this morning had such a family look of these last, that he opened it with a weary certainty of his correspondent's need for £3. 5s. 6d. to prevent the bed being taken from under his sick child; but though it was written on cheap paper in a hand carefully made to appear illiterate, its contents were far other than he had expected.
"Ask your wife where she was on the third afternoon of the World's Bazaar. A friend."
Sainty had never in his life received an anonymous letter, and the experience was distinctly unpleasant. He shook it off into the fire as St. Paul did the other venomous thing, but failed to get the poison out of his system so cheaply. In case it should not work, his nameless "friend" took care to repeat the dose, and several other communications of a like tenor followed the first, but none of them produced in him the unpleasant sensations of that chilly May morning, when he stood watching the sparks run along the blackened paper and the grey ash writhe and twist for its final flight up the chimney. After a time he came to regard them as more or less in the natural order of things, and even ceased to read them; but the writer showed such skill in varying the address, that in no case was he able to detect one without opening it. Some contained but a single sentence, others were much longer, but all suggested doubts of his wife's conduct, and recommended a surveillance of which the very notion was repugnant to him. Of course he could take no notice of such things. He wondered if he ought to speak to Cissy about them, only to dismiss the idea as impossible. Still less could he mention them to any one else. Eventually he decided that there was but one way to treat an anonymous letter, which was to behave as if it had not been received. None the less they stirred in him a vague uneasiness. The feeling that somewhere about one an unknown enemy is watching for a chance to hurt, fills life with an unpleasant sense of ambush. He could think of no one who had cause to wish him ill. The enmity, then, must be to Cissy. A disappointed rival? He needed no reminder of the extreme unlikelihood of any one's grudging her the possession of his affections. But how if the rivalry were for the possession of some one else's affections? That possibility was not without its sting. For him there could be no question of jealousy, in the ordinary sense of the word; but he began to apprehend the possibilities of scandal, to understand that his acceptance of the anomalous part which his wife had thrust upon him by no means exhausted her power of injuring his happiness or his honour; in short, that he was saddled with an obligation to guard what he did not possess.
Meanwhile he found himself in the no less ironical position of having to champion her many doings, which in his heart he disliked, against his mother, with whom he secretly sympathised. Lady Charmington was far from having said all her say on that first morning at breakfast. Cissy's prediction of her disapproval of their London life was amply verified. Occupied with the matters that had brought her to town, and going into a totally different world from her daughter-in-law's, she was as ignorant as her son of the things that would most have stirred her wrath; but she found quite enough to rebuke in the house itself. Cissy's idleness and dissipation, her late hours, her card-playing, her neglect of her household duties, and the consequent waste and profusion, her Sabbath-breaking, and the completeness with which she ignored her husband and her home (not to speak of her guest and mother-in-law) were each and severally the subjects of the elder lady's severe animadversions to the offender herself when occasion offered, but far more often to the patient ears of poor Sainty, who had to defend the culprit as best he might.
Another fruitful topic of maternal discontent was Lady Belchamber's failure to provide an heir to the property. This, it may well be supposed, was not an agreeable topic to Sainty, nor one on which he had any ready rejoinders at his command.
"You have been married close on a year," said Lady Charmington, "and I see no signs or hope of a child. I said something to Cissy about it one day, and she laughed disagreeably, and said she was glad of it. I asked if she didn't think she had any duty to the family in the matter. I am almost ashamed to tell you what she answered: that a baby was a great tie and a nuisance, and she hoped if she had to have one, it would be at a convenient time of year, when it didn't interfere with things."
"I don't suppose very young women ever want to have a baby," Sainty said doubtfully, feeling something was expected of him.
"Cissy is not so young as all that. She must be two- or three-and-twenty. I can't imagine any woman marrying and not wanting to have a child. I am sure when I married I prayed most fervently that I might give my husband a son."
"Well, you know, the answer to your prayer was not quite all you could have wished," suggested Sainty.
Lady Charmington ignored the interruption. "It is not as though she were not a perfectly normal healthy young woman," she said, "for I never was taken in for a minute by all that business of the shock to her nervous system at Belchamber. Constant dissipation, racketing about morning, noon, and night, and tight lacing are not the ways to go about having an heir. I only hope she mayn't do anything else, if she's so afraid that the duties of a wife and mother will cut her out of a party or two."
"O mother!" Sainty expostulated.
"If she is not going to have any children, what was the use of your marrying?" continued his aggrieved parent. "We are just where we were with regard to that other woman. She has children fast enough! Cissy seems to think she has come into the family merely to have what she calls a good time, and spend the money that I pinched and scraped together for you for so many years. I have never seen such sinful waste as goes on in this house."
Lady Charmington was only putting into words what her son had often, with some bitterness, asked himself. What was the use of his marrying? He had not perhaps quite so crudely admitted, even in his inner consciousness, how much he had been influenced in making up his mind to such a step by the thought of excluding the children of Lady Arthur from the succession to his name and estates, but it had none the less been a powerful motive with him. Had his brother passed his examinations, gone into the army, and in due course married some commonplace, unobjectionable young lady, it is more than doubtful if even Lady Eccleston would have succeeded in dragging Sainty into matrimony. For one thing, she would have had to reckon with Lady Charmington as an enemy instead of an ally, which would have put a quite different complexion on the affair. The young man reflected sometimes with dumb rage on how his life was turned topsy-turvy, haled from familiar field and woodland to this hated city, that a girl, who was really no more to him than any other, should junket from morning till night with a set of people he could not endure, and squander money, with which he might have benefited millions of his fellow-creatures, on her senseless, unoriginal pleasures. And all for what? Sooner or later the children of his undesirable sister-in-law would sit in his place, and inherit his patrimony as surely as if he had followed his natural bent, and led a peaceful, laborious life remote from all connection with Lady Deans and her playfellows. And with it all Cissy had not even the common decency to avoid the tongue of scandal, as these odious anonymous letters shewed him. He really did think she might have spared him that. Day after day he thought of saying something to her on the subject, and always he was prevented by lack of courage or opportunity, or else some unfortunate speech of his mother drove him back into the position of his wife's involuntary champion.
"Cissy tells me she is going away for Whitsuntide," Lady Charmington announced one day, with the sniff that indicated much more than met the ear in this apparently simple announcement.
"Is she?" said Sainty, anxious not to commit himself.
"Has she not even deigned to let you know?" inquired her ladyship scornfully.
"I think she did say something about the Suffords having asked her there."
"Were you not included in the invitation?"
"I really don't know; I never asked. I didn't want to go. I suppose Lady Sufford went through the form of asking me, but she probably knew I shouldn't come. It would be too terrible if I were obliged to go wherever Cissy does."
"The arrangement seems to suit her perfectly," said Lady Charmington; "but I can't see why you shouldn't go."
"It would add to no one's pleasure, and take away considerably from mine," said Sainty promptly.
"Always pleasure!" cried Lady Charmington. "The invariable argument! no thought of duty!"
"If a thing which is purely a question of amusement doesn't amuse one, why make a duty of it?" argued her son.
"Well, if it is not your duty to go about with your wife, I should have thought it was hers to stay at home with you. Of course I quite understand that she mentioned her plans to me with the delicate intention of letting me see that she could not keep me beyond next week; but she need not trouble; I had settled to go to mother on Tuesday in any case. She has failed very much lately, and I shall have to be with her more. By the way, I found she was rather hurt that Cissy had never once been to see her since she came to town in February, nor asked her to come in and see your new house."
"Dear me!" said Sainty, "I ought to have thought of it. Of course we should have been only too delighted to see granny, if I had only thought she would care to see the house; but she seems always so absorbed in other things, it never occurred to me. It was very stupid of me. I've been several times to see her, but she always talks as if it was such a business to drive into London. I never dreamt of asking it of her. And she says her sight has got so bad, that I wasn't sure how much she would see if she came."
"She would probably see a great deal that would shock her, as I have," said Lady Charmington. "Have you ever calculated at all what this house is going to cost you by the time it is finished?"
"Oh, I've kept pretty good track of the expenses. I've paid for a good deal of the work as it went along. It has all been done much more extravagantly than I thought necessary. Indeed, as far as I am concerned, I shouldn't care if we had no London house at all; but Uncle Cor seemed to think it indispensable, and he doesn't consider that we have done much we need not. He is always afraid that, with my saving tendencies, I shall fail to do myself credit. He needn't be uneasy as long as Cissy is on hand to provide the antidote."
"There is a great difference between having things suitable to your position and being foolishly and wickedly extravagant," remarked Lady Charmington.
"Perhaps I have deliberately rather given Cissy her head about this house," Sainty answered, "to keep her hands off Belchamber; there was a great deal she was thinking of doing there, but I hope I have put a stop to that."
"Belchamber!" cried out his mother in horror. "What could she want to do there? It was always kept in perfect repair; there wasn't a door knob missing nor a tap out of order, and when you came of age there was an immense amount of money spent in cleaning and restoring. I always thought it quite unnecessary her doing up those rooms in that ridiculous way last summer. They looked to me more like an improper person's apartments than like anything in an English lady's house."
"Well, I can't say that I always admire Cissy's taste, myself; there's a little want of knowledge about it."
Sainty did not judge it necessary to tell his mother how far reaching had been Cissy's plans for the remodelling of Belchamber; he had surprised them by an accident, and had promptly and firmly opposed them. He could not bear the desecrating touch of fleeting fashion on anything so artistically and historically complete as the home of his childhood, and had been glad to purchase its immunity from the threatened changes by larger concessions in the matter of the London house. Perhaps, even so, Cissy would not have abandoned her projects without a struggle, but for the appearance of a most unlooked-for ally to her husband in the person of Claude Morland, who had supervened in the height of the discussion and thrown all the weight of his authority into the scale for the saving of Belchamber.
"Sainty is perfectly right," he said, with his most pontifical air; "it would be vandalism. There isn't a more beautiful specimen of its period in England than the great saloon or the Vandyke dining-hall; they are perfect. And the red, yellow, and green rooms, though they are later and not so pure, have a great cachet of their own, and are perfectly de l'époque as far as they go. No, no, my dear Cissy, it would be a sin. I am all for your using the rooms, and living in them; but, believe me, you mustn't touch them. Do what you like here; you have a clean slate to work on; but don't attempt to 'improve' Belchamber."
Sainty was astonished at the meekness with which Cissy abandoned her cherished schemes, but much too grateful to Claude for backing him up to resent this evidence of his cousin's greater authority. He knew, too, that he owed it to him that the London house, if a little over-decorated and too obviously costly, was, on the whole, harmonious and in good taste.
By dint of unremitting vigilance and almost superhuman tact, the date of Lady Charmington's departure had almost been reached without any more serious encounter than a few skirmishes between her and her daughter-in-law; but one afternoon, having heard his mother come in, and gone in search of her, Sainty saw at a glance that a battle royal was raging. Cissy was lolling exasperatingly calm and contemptuous among the piles of cushions she delighted to heap upon the furniture, while Lady Charmington sat stiffly erect, an ominous light in her eye, and a pink spot burning in the centre of each sallow cheek. Her son heard her voice as he entered, and quailed at the familiar tone of it.
"I am well aware," she was saying, "that nothing I say will have the smallest influence on your behaviour, but none the less I feel it my solemn duty to protest, when I see things going on of which I entirely disapprove."
"Why trouble, if you are so sure that you will produce no effect?" asked Cissy.
"Because I have some consideration for my son's honour, to which you and he seem to be equally indifferent."
"Oh! His honour!" protested Cissy.
"Yes; his honour," persisted Lady Charmington. "When I was first married, a young woman of your age, a young wife not a year married, who received men alone, sprawling about on sofas in that kind of indecent clothing, would have been considered to have lost her character."
"Mother!" interposed Sainty.
"Oh, it's largely your fault for allowing such things," his mother flashed out at him. "If you were more of a man, your wife would never dare treat you as an absolute nonentity in your own house."
"But what's it all about?" asked Sainty. "What has Cissy been doing?"
"I'm sure I don't know," answered Lady Belchamber. "You had better ask your mother."
"I came in just now," said Lady Charmington, "and found her with that flimsy rag she calls a tea-gown half off her back lolling about among the cushions there with Algy Montgomery. I don't call it decent."
"Why, Algy's a sort of relation, you know," answered Cissy; "his stepmother's Sainty's grandmother; it makes him a kind of uncle."
"Kind of fiddlestick! a good-for-nothing young rip in the Life Guards, of six- or seven-and-twenty at the outside."
"Do you suppose, if I were doing anything that wasn't perfectly innocent, that I shouldn't have taken jolly good care that you didn't come spying in?" inquired Cissy, with lofty scorn.
Lady Charmington choked. "It is not my habit to spy," she cried, "and I am not accusing you of actual misconduct; but it's not only to-day that I object to. It's your general mode of going on. Yesterday you were shut up for ever so long with that vulgar Mr. Pryor, and you drive Claude all over London in your brougham. No honest woman should take any man in her brougham, no matter who it is, that isn't her husband or her brother."
"Would her grandfather be admissible?" asked Cissy sweetly. "I must say for a high-minded person who angrily repudiates the idea of spying, you seem to be strangely well informed as to all my movements."
"Cissy!" expostulated Sainty.
"Well, what is it?" she asked, turning to him politely.
"I have been deceived in you, very much deceived," Lady Charmington broke out. "When you wanted to marry my son, you were all sweetness and honey to me; now you've attained your object, you insult me. From the day I arrived here you have studied in every way to let me see I was unwelcome; there wasn't an attention you could have paid me you didn't pointedly omit, or a possible slight that you neglected to put on me. I can well see that a mother-in-law in the house by no means suited your book."
"Even such a sweet affectionate one?" interposed Cissy.
"Mark my words," continued the exasperated dowager, "you will come to grief. You are playing a dangerous game, my lady. You have no conscience, no principle, no sense of duty to restrain or save you. If you forget God and go after your own vain amusements from morning to night, you will assuredly make shipwreck in the end."
"Well, at least you will have the satisfaction of thinking it was not for want of being warned."
"Your sarcasms will never prevent my speaking my mind. I have seen nothing in this house against which I do not think it incumbent on me, not only as the mother of your husband but as a Christian woman, to bear testimony---luxury, waste, riotous living, and indelicate behaviour. I am going away, and I know you will be glad to be rid of me, but I couldn't have reconciled it to my conscience to go without speaking."
"I must say that you have eased your conscience very thoroughly, and most agreeably. Is there anything else your sense of duty impels you to mention before you go?"
At this, Lady Charmington fairly lost her temper. She strode over to Cissy, and Sainty flung himself between them, afraid that she was going to strike her. "You little minx!" she cried. "You little selfish, vulgar minx! You have lied and wheedled your way into this family, and grabbed all you could lay your hands upon, and what have you done in return? The one thing that was asked of you, to bear a child, and give the house an heir, you have most lamentably failed in doing."
Cissy sprang to her feet, a curious evil look on her face, and for a moment the two women looked into each other's eyes. "Oh! in the matter of a baby, take care I don't astonish some of you yet," she cried.
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